Digital property is an evolving economic and legal concept that challenges modern technological and legal frameworks. Generally, digital property refers to any digital data that has some manner of ownership attached to it, for example, through copyright protection, trade secret protection, etc. In a typical copyright scenario, copyrights in an original work of authorship (e.g., a photograph) may be attributed to the author (e.g., the photographer). Furthermore, the work may be embodied in the form of digital data (e.g., a digital image file), the copying, distribution, derivation, etc. of which are exclusively within the rights of the author. Accordingly, each instance of the digital data (e.g., each copy of the digital image file) is an instance of the digital property of that author.
The exclusive rights associated with digital property may be transferred (e.g., assigned to another) or licensed for use by others. For example, the photographer may license another party to use a digital image on the party's website, subject to certain limitations to which the parties have agreed. However, once the digital image file is copied and transferred out of the author's control, there is substantial risk of unauthorized copying, use, modification and distribution. Accordingly, Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are continually being developed to facilitate the owner's technological and legal control of his or her digital property rights.
However, existing DRM approaches have proven inadequate, costly, invasive, and inconvenient to the licensed users and/or digital property owners (e.g., being subject to technological breakdowns, such as computer crashes, resulting in a loss of a licensed copies), thereby limiting the widespread acceptance of these approaches. For example, a large digital music vending service recently announced its termination of music vending activities, raising the possibility that customers of the service may lose the ability to play the music that they “purchased”.
Accordingly, digital property ownership remains exposed to violations of the owner's property rights (e.g., from theft of the digital property by others), and furthermore, consumers remain suspicious of protected digital property. These incompatible factors amplify the transactional costs associated with distributing digital content. In turn, digital property owners/publishers charge higher licensing fees to offset losses caused by digital property theft and consumers find the convenience of unauthorized digital content worth the ethical violations and possible criminal sanctions implicated by obtaining the content through theft. The cycle feeds on itself.